A variety of wireless data processing devices have been introduced over the past several years. These include wireless personal digital assistants (“PDAs”) such as Palm® VIIx handheld, cellular phone equipped with data processing capabilities and more recently, corporate wireless messaging devices such as the Blackberry™ wireless pager developed by Research in Motion (“RIM”)™.
While many of these wireless devices maintain a network data connection, their radio modules transition between an active state and a dormant state. The radio module enters into the active state in order to send or receive data. While the radio is in the active state, all incoming telephone calls go straight to voicemail. Also, when the radio module is in the active state the battery is drained at a much faster rate than when in the dormant state.
Various wireless networks (e.g., Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA)) benefit from the radio module remaining in the active state for a longer period of time because networks expend a significant amount of resources in order to switch the radio module between the dormant state and the active state. The resources are expended in order to locate a wireless device, which must occur before any data can be transmitted. Therefore, the networks have carrier configurable timeouts that prevent the wireless device from quickly reentering the dormant state. These timeouts can range from 10-20 seconds depending on the carrier. For a power user, a wireless device, due to these timeout values, could be in the active state for 25% of the time during business hours, thus making the wireless device unavailable to receive incoming calls as well as draining the battery at an unacceptable rate.